Staff and students from Drawing and Printmaking at the Victorian College of the Arts discuss their new imprint Damp Proof Membrane (DPM) Press. The Press presents student publications alongside VCA Editions by established artists including recent international guests Heman Chong and Gladys Kalichini. As part of their stall at the NGV Book Fair, students are showing publications made during ‘Bound Volumes: Bookbinding – Multiples – Dissemination,’ a 6-week course that is part of the new VCA Drawing and Printmaking curriculum. Panellists will discuss the design of this program and examples of student publications made within it.   

The new Drawing and Printmaking curriculum is underpinned by an understanding of the powerful role art practices play in shaping cultural values. We understand art practice as a form of knowledge and action that can contribute to addressing the multiple issues that face societies. ‘Bound Volumes: Bookbinding – Multiples – Dissemination’ engages students in an examination of the historical and contemporary possibilities of publishing in an expanded sense – publishing as a means of producing work and ideas and circulating them through a public. The course includes book-making with paper but also websites, book-binding with nontraditional materials, performance, radio and speech etc. Students have grappled with publishing not as a form of documenting, promoting or ‘explaining’ their work. Instead, they have created works that are held in the hand, experienced in a specific sequence or direction, find a home in a collection or exist as multiples – each publication is a careful consideration of the relationship between work and audience.